More women than ever are choosing to have their breasts reconstructed after having mastectomy for breast cancer, newly released data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reveal, and the greatest rise is among women older than 65. Gedge Rosson, a breast reconstruction expert at Johns Hopkins, says these findings confirm those from a Hopkins study.

Rosson: We were able to look at patients who were over 65 with Medicare and then patients below 65 and we found that it was not so much age that impacted the patient’s outcome, their short term outcomes like complications, but really just more their medical comorbidities. So if you have someone who is over 65 as long as they are otherwise healthy and haven’t had strokes or heart attacks or diabetes then they will do just as well as someone who is younger than 65. :29

Rosson says the good news is women do have time following a mastectomy to consider whether they’d like to have reconstruction. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.